In a communication network of today, certain communication services may be offered to the subscribers of the communication network according to “product offerings.” For example, the communication service “mobile broadband connectivity” may be offered to individual subscribers of a cellular or other wireless or wired communication network in defined blocks of time, e.g., hourly, wherein one such hourly offering can be seen as a product offering. Additionally, or alternatively, the product offering may be based on discrete blocks of data transfer amounts.
The product offerings are provisioned in advanced (pre-provisioned) in the subscriber database responsive to subscriber input, e.g., pre-purchased through a web portal, or they are pre-provisioned based on scheduled or automatic processing running within the communication network. Because usage of a product-related service is authorized for a given subscriber conditioned on there being related products already provisioned for that subscriber, the network operator is obliged to provision and store potentially large numbers of products in its subscriber database, which requires lots of storage space.
For example, for a mobile broadband service having an offering in which connectivity is provided in one-hour increments, the communication network operator might, for each subscriber that is eligible for the service, provision twenty-four products to cover the next twenty-four hour usage period. Each such product corresponds to a specific one of the hours and is tied to a corresponding one of the eligible subscribers. Similarly, the network operator may make a product offering in which subscribers are allowed 1 GB of data transfer per month, where usage is assessed in 25 MB increments.
With this approach, all the subscribers that have signed up for a given offer have to have their corresponding products available for authorizing actual service usage and all such products must be stored in advance in the subscriber database. Product storage quickly becomes burdensome. To cover the 24-hour and/or monthly data transfer product offering described above, the network operator would generate from twenty-four to forty products per subscriber, depending on which product offering the subscriber selected. Not all of these products may be used, and they may later need to be removed. Example numbers of 6 000 000 subscribers and fifty bytes of storage required per product imply storage requirements of 7.2 GB to 12 GB for the pre-provisioned products. That amount of data is prohibitive, particularly because of the way subscriber databases are used in real-time within the network charging systems.
Recently, a concept called automatic provision of products for communication services has been introduced. Briefly, this new feature means that products can be provisioned in the same moment as they are needed. These automatically provided products are based on an existing base product and created on demand by traffic events or sessions. In other words, the automatically provided products do not exist for the subscriber in the network until they are created on demand. With such a concept, only the existing base product needs to be provisioned in advance and the rest of the products are provisioned when needed. Thereby, the amount of data that needs to be stored in advance, as in the example above, can be lowered considerably.
With the automatically provided products, the handling of policy setting gets complicated. According to 3GPP TS 23.203 V13.2.0, policy settings for any product are today transferred from the policy control server to a core network node, which may be a GGSN, upon an initial request from the core network node. However, the current policy logic of the charging system can only retrieve settings for existing products. This means that when the concept automatic provisioning of products is used, only the policy settings for the base product and not the policy settings for the automatic provisioned products are retrieved and reported back to the GGSN in response to the received initial request.
Then when the subscriber signals to the network that he/she wants to use such a service/product, the GGSN does not have any policy settings for the product and may then either have to wait until such a policy setting is received, which may correspond to a charging interval of minutes or hours, before it provides the user with the policy corresponding to the product, or it may provide the user with a default policy that probably does not correspond to what the operator has promised the subscriber according to the offering of the product. Consequently, there is a need for a more efficient handling of products, and more specifically of product policies in a policy control system of a communication network.